On Liberty was also inspired by Mill’s peculiar personal situation. Years later, looking back, the Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour recalled that, during his student days at Cambridge, “Mill possessed an authority in the English universities comparable to that wielded in the Middle Ages by Aristotle.” Within weeks of his wife's death, Mill overcame the anxieties he nurtured and delivered his manuscript After the extraordinary education described in his Autobiography, he had emerged as the widely respected and leading philosopher/economist of his age. There was no one better suited to this challenge than JS Mill. “The subject of this essay is not the so-called ‘liberty of the will’, so unfortunately opposed to the misnamed doctrine of philosophical necessity but civil, or social liberty: the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual.” Mill’s more sober purpose was to transform the idea of liberty into a philosophically respectable theory and express it in a form that could co-exist with Victorian culture and society, animating the body politic, but not upsetting it: Those traditions, the popular and the radical, celebrated something perilously close to a state of nature. But he had a different philosophical agenda from his predecessors. More immediately, he was picking up from Tom Paine, Adam Smith and William Godwin. And so, when John Stuart Mill addressed the idea of the free and sovereign individual in On Liberty, he was plugging into a current of English thought with deep and ancient connections.

Js mill on liberty